a blog about movies and politics by noah gittell

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There are very few laughs in Brad’s Status. This is by design. Contrary to its marketing, which pitches the Ben Stiller film as a cringe comedy about a father embarrassing his son on a trip to visit colleges, the sophomore directorial effort from Hollywood screenwriter Mike White is a dark, desperate affair. It’s a deeply…

You might have noticed this blog basically doesn’t exist anymore. When I started it five years ago, I was posting two or three times a week. Then I started getting published elsewhere, and my original posts here began to dwindle. These days, it is a repository for reviews no one has paid me to write…

A Quiet Passion is a chilly, detached affair, just as Emily Dickinson would have preferred it. The first biopic of Dickinson, one of the greatest American artists, is not particularly interested in her playfully haunting poetry. We get snippets of it here and there, but this isn’t one of those biopics in which the subject’s wretched…

In the 1960s and 1970s, Americans flocked to spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly and The Outlaw Josey Wales . These films subverted the morality of classical westerns by depicting vicious worlds that went without heroes. Compared to their predecessors in the genre, they were far more violent, with an amorality…

Edward Snowden is director Oliver Stone’s kind of hero: a zealous patriot who becomes disillusioned about his beloved country, publicly criticizes it, is labeled a traitor, and eventually learns a more complex definition of what it means to be patriotic. Stone has been down this road before – with the young Vietnam-era soldiers of Platoon and Born…

In every possible way, Pete’s Dragon is a throwback to a simpler time. The family fairy tale, a remake of an unremarkable 1977 Disney movie, takes place in a world where small towns have no chain stores and no one carries a cell phone. It could be the 1950s or just a forgotten town in…

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains a discussion of the plot and ending of “The BFG.” Consider yourself warned. For ninety minutes, The BFG is one of the most intimate, apolitical movies Steven Spielberg has ever made. Despite his reputation as a popcorn auteur, Spielberg’s work has always carried at least a hint of politics, even…

In the early decades of cinema, Catholics called the shots in Hollywood. All films were submitted to the Catholic Legion of Decency for approval, and, if they didn’t meet the agency’s standards of morality, there would be a boycott, and 20 million American Catholics would stay home. We’ve come a long way since then. In…

The boy in Sing Street doesn’t seem like anything special, not at first. It’s his first day at a new school, forced to switch in the middle of the year because his parents are trying to save money. He’s already had a run-in with the school bully, and it’s easy to imagine what his future will…

I liked Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” so much I wrote about it twice. First, there was my review in Washington City Paper. My editor challenged me to draw some connections between the film and “Born to be Blue,” a biopic of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker that was released the same day. I did my…

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Tina Fey’s new war-journalism rom-com, is getting hit from all sides. In addition to its paltry box-office performance, accusations of whitewashing have rightly dogged the filmmakers, who cast American actor Christopher Abbott and British actor Alfred Molina as Afghan characters. Fey herself is taking the brunt of the blame, epitomized by Buzzfeed’s…

Dear Reader, Hey! Good to see ya. How are you? How was your year? Don’t actually answer, of course. I’m just waiting for you to ask me about my year so I can write the rest of this post. Sorry, but I thought it was rude to just jump in and start monologuing about myself.…